“£40,” he rather reluctantly answered.
“There’s a slight difference between 40 and 400,” I ventured to remark.
“A mere nothing,” he said, with the greatest gravity stumbling on a joke; “that’s common in fiddle buying. You don’t always give for an instrument exactly what it’s worth.”
“Then its value is just the price which you choose to put on it?”
“That’s about it;” and then he hastily changed the subject by narrating all the circumstances of the strange robbery much as I have put them down, only taking much longer to go through.
When he had finished I quietly returned to the point at which he had broken off, pretty sure that he had a reason for avoiding it.
“If the fiddle is worth £400, and you got it at a tenth of that price, you must have got a great bargain?” I observed.
“I am coming to that,” he answered, with a groan. “A great bargain? Yes, I thought so too at the time, but I’ve never had peace since I bought it. It has a history, and as that, I am sure, has something to do with the robbery, you may as well hear it now.”
“Then there is more to listen to?” I ruefully returned, with something like an echo of his groan, and a wistful thought of the cosy blankets I had left. “Will it take long to tell?”
“Not very long—it must not, for I must have you and some of your comrades out to watch the departure of the Newcastle trains.”